ReadNOW

In London in the winter of 1999, running coach Harmandar Singh took on a new student who was older than his father.

Fauja Singh was 89, thin as a reed, and had a scraggy beard that nearly reached his chest. For their first marathon training session that November morning, he had turned up in a three-piece suit.

“I sort of had to tell him that if he was running down the road wearing a three-piece suit, there is a possibility that the police will say, what are you running from?” says Harmandar.

It turned out that the Sikh farmer from the Indian state of Punjab who had recently moved to be with one of his sons in the London borough of Ilford, was running from his past.

“He had lost his daughter, wife, and a younger son in quick succession in the previous years,” says Harmandar.” His family was concerned he would fall into depression.”

The coach knew how it felt. He too had lost someone a few months before: his father.

For the next 14 years, Harmandar says, Fauja Singh was the best student he had. Fauja’s years at his sprawling rice and sugarcane fields of rural Jalandhar had made him tough. Folklore had it that he worked, even when his bulls were tired.

Fauja trained regularly, trusted his coach fully, and couldn’t tell a mile from a kilometer. “I used that to my advantage,” says Harmandar. “When there were several miles left, I used to tell him they were kilometers.”

From the year 2000, Singh completed nine full marathons and several shorter ones. He travelled the world, from Hong Kong to New York, often plodding the track in his bright yellow turban. At the 2003 Toronto Waterfront Marathon, he clocked his personal best of five hours and forty minutes. Eight years later at the same event, he became the oldest person to finish a marathon. In doing so, he beat more than a hundred much younger runners in the 26.2 mile event.

Fauja was 100 years old then, according to his passport. Yet, he never made the record books – because he didn’t have a birth certificate to prove his age. Few in British-ruled colonial India in the 20th century had one.

The media loved Fauja anyway. He rarely refused interviews, often with his coach or a family member translating from Punjabi. Sports brand Adidas featured him in their “Impossible is nothing” ad campaign. A children’s writer published a book on him. A bureaucrat-turned-author penned a biography of the “Turbaned Tornado.”

Back at his family home in India — a three-storied farmhouse in Beas Pind village, Punjab — medals, trophies and certificates piled up. Fauja’s family proudly displayed them on shelves and wooden cabinets, turning their living room into a sporting hall-of-fame.

Fauja retired from marathons in 2013, and moved back to India around 2022. Locals often invited him to sporting events. “He’d go as a guest but tell the organizers, I also want a medal,” his granddaughter Japneet Kaur recalled. “At home, he’d climb the couch and hang it by a nail.”

On the afternoon of 14 July 2025, Fuaja had stepped out to check on his rice fields in the neighboring village when he was hit by an SUV. Fauja lay in a heap on the busy highway for several minutes until Balbir Singh, a friend of his son’s who was passing by, noticed him. “The doctors said he could’ve been saved if we’d reached sooner,” said Balbir. “But he’d lost too much blood.”

His death at age 114 made headlines around the world. India’s prime minister said the news pained him. His London running club said they would build a Fauja Singh Clubhouse on his training route. A group of Indian sculptors started carving a life-size statue of him.

But it also put a spotlight on India’s deadly roads where more than 150,000 people are killed in accidents annually. Last year, India’s highway minister Nitin Gadkari admitted in Parliament that the death toll keeps rising every year. “When I go to attend international conferences where there is a discussion on road accidents, I try to hide my face,” he said.

Police arrested a 26-year-old man from a neighboring Dasupur village for the hit-and-run. Amrit Singh Dhillon had tried his best to avoid detention after the collision, local media quoted the police saying. He took his car off-road to escape CCTV cameras, covered it in his garage, switched to a bike “and was casually going around.”

The alacrity of the police action surprised Fauja’s family. “Hit-and-runs happen because culprits think they can get away,” Fauja’s nephew Parmeet Singh said. “If police always acted promptly, people would not be as careless on the roads.”

Amrit Singh Dhillon’s aunt, too, did not seem to expect the arrest. When ReadNOW visited her residence in Dasupur village, she was unwilling to be interviewed or share her name. But she did say this: “The media picked up the issue because he [Fauja] was a celebrity. Otherwise, accidents happen all the time.”

Why are India’s roads so dangerous?

Local traffic police chief Manjit Singh has a theory: “The youth today watch foreign films and try to imitate the stunts.” But the pedestrians, he says, are no better.

Fauja Singh was killed on a busy highway. His granddaughter Japneet says, he usually crossed the traffic median to get to his fields in the village on the other side. Many people in the two villages do the same; the nearest pedestrian crossing is more than half a mile away. On the day ReadNOW visited the place, we saw a father jumping the median with two kids on his bike.

“The mentality of Indian pedestrians is, let’s take a shortcut,” says officer Manjit Singh.

But Rohit Baluja, director of the Indian Institute of Road Traffic Education, says there is a reason people take such risks.

Road construction has boomed under the decade-long rule of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. Many of these roads, Baluja says, cut across towns and villages but lack warning signs or pedestrian underpasses. When there’s an accident, he says, authorities usually blame the drivers or pedestrians. “Not even a single engineer or a road authority is booked for failures.”

Baluja’s institute conducts research and training in traffic management. “When we investigate accidents, and we’ve done around 8,000 such cases, we find that almost 30-33% are because of failures of the road and traffic engineering.”

He points to the place where Fauja Singh died: “There are approach roads to two villages opposite each other. But there are no rumble strips on the highway in the middle, no sign saying there’s an upcoming junction. We build roads for the vehicles. We do not consider the vulnerable road users.”

Fauja Singh’s body hadn’t failed him till his last day. He took no medicines, ate thrice a day, and gorged on the mangoes that grew in his backyard. Age had stooped his back and shrunk him to his bones. He still walked everywhere, often without a walking stick.

Fauja had no formal education. Days before he died, his granddaughter was teaching him the English alphabet. In turn, Fauja taught her – an aspiring marathoner – tricks of his trade. “Only the other day he was showing me how to do a warm-up,” Japneet, 16, recalls. “I told him that he should be our PE teacher.”

If not for the accident, his biographer Khushwant Singh says Fauja Singh might have lived on for many years. “I’d once asked him if he was afraid of dying,” he recalls.

“Fauja said, ‘I am afraid. Because now, I am fully living my life.’”